And this Katrin talked in a quick, light voice, with ups and downs and skips and quivers in it, as spring-heeled as a chamois goat on the mountains of the south.

“Ah, Tiny-chen,” she would cry, as she came undulating and cooing in to our Helene, “is it you, dearest?  ’Tis as sweet to see you as for birds to kiss on bough!  I have danced all day in the sunshine just to think that I should come to see you!  And tell me why you have not been to visit me.  Ah, bad one—­cruelest—­as cruel as she is pretty” (appealing to me), “is she not?  And there, our Michael, great oaf, sits at home desolated that he does not hear her foot on the stairs.  The foolish fellow tells me that he listens for four little pit-a-pats every time that I come up from the court-yard, and is disappointed when there come back only my poor two.”

And Katrin becked and nodded and set her head to the side—­like to the divine Io-Cow playing at being little Jenny Wren.

And as for me, I kept my gravity—­or, rather, how could I lose it, hearing such nonsense about that great stupid beer-vat, Michael Texel.

Michael Texel, indeed!  I should admire to hear of Michael Texel so much as raising his eyes to the Little Playmate.  Why, I would stave him on the open street like a puncheon of eight, and think nothing of the doing of it.

Michael Texel, indeed!

But I am forgetting.  My business at this time was to make love to Katrin, so that I might banish the ill impression which Helene had formed concerning that pleasant, harmless little Christian’s Elsa over there.  I never heard anything so foolish in my life.  But, then, what women will think and say passes the imagination of man.

Michael Texel indeed!

The thought of that young man of beef and beer recurred so persistently and forcibly to me that for a time I could scarce command myself to speak civilly to his sister.  Though, of course, she was quite different, being a woman, and informed with such a quick and dainty spirit that at times it seemed as it had been imprisoned in her too massive frame and held “in subjection to the flesh,” as the clerics say.  God wot, I never knew I had so much religion and morality about me till I came to write.  If I do not have a care this tale of mine will turn out almost as painful as a book of devotion which they set children to read on saints’ days to keep them from being over-happy.

But I subdued my feelings and drew up somewhat nearer to Katrin.

“My Little Sister—­” so I began, cunningly, as I thought—­“my sister Helene is, indeed, fortunate to have so fair a friend, and one so devoted—­”

“As my brother Michael, yes,” she twittered, with her most ponderous, cage-bird manner; “yes, indeed, he is devoted to her.”

“No,” said I, hastily (confound the great hulking camel!), “I mean such a faithful friend as yourself.  I, alas, have no friend.  I am cut off from all society of my kind.  Often and often have I felt the weight of loneliness press heavy upon me in this darksome tower.”